Caitriona Balfe on Her Profound Claire Experience

Another interview with Caitriona Balfe also came out today. This time it is from Variety, and it is not so much about Outlander season three, but her experience being Claire. There are some really good quotes from Caitriona in this one, so it is definitely worth the read. Excerpts are below, but head over to Variety to read the entire interview.

With this role, at times it almost seems like you’re not really just playing one part or appearing in one show — it’s almost like you’re doing multiple shows, because there are so many timelines and the settings can be so different. Does it ever feel that way for you?

I mean, definitely, some days it can be a little confusing. I think when we came back to Season Two and we were in Paris, and we had all of the Parisian sets and it was a whole new set of characters, it was quite jarring in the beginning. Essentially your character remains the same, even though they go through such different situations, and you have Claire with Frank in the ’40s and then she’s with Jamie and then she goes back, so it can be quite confusing in some ways. But I’ve always thought that Claire retains her center, no matter where she is, and that’s one of the things I love about the character.

How would you describe that center?

For me, Claire is such a survivor. It doesn’t matter where she ends up or what has happened to her, she finds a way to get on with her life and make it something great. That’s what I love about her. In Season One, where she first goes through the stones and arrives in this dangerous and dirty place, she doesn’t just cower and fall down and get destroyed. She finds her place and she finds a way to make herself useful, and she finds a way to enjoy herself and then to create a life.

And again, when she comes back into the 20th century, even though she’s lost the love of her life (as far as she knows), she doesn’t just disintegrate. She gets herself together, and she becomes a surgeon in a time when there were very few female doctors. So it’s just that strength that she has inside — that no matter what befalls her, she will find a way to [draw on] the best of herself.

As you play her, have you learned from her? Have you taken any of that from the character as you go through this experience with her?

I think you can’t help doing that, in some ways. This whole experience and this whole journey — I mean, it was something that was incredibly new for me. I’d never done any TV before, and any job I’d had before, they were small parts. I think the longest I’ve ever been on anything was five weeks on an indie film. So you don’t go through an experience like this without growing personally in an enormous capacity. But I do think playing someone who is so resilient and who has such a reserve of strength — it makes you examine yourself and it makes you, I think, aware of strengths that you weren’t necessarily sure that you had before.

Are you in production for Season Three, and if so, what has that been like so far?

We’re almost halfway through [Season Three]. It’s been great. Obviously Sam [Heughan] and I — our storylines are quite separate for the first few episodes, so I’ve been filming a lot with Tobias [Menzies] and Sophie [Skelton]. And it’s been quite interesting. We’re trying to tell sort of vignettes of a person’s life over the space of 20 years, and it’s been really fun. But I think we’re all ready to get back to the Scottish Claire of it all.